Way Down on the High Lonely Read Online Free PDF Page A

through,” Anne answered.
    Jim Collier hustled to shake their hands.
    “A real pleasure to meet you,” he said.
    “Yeah,” Neal said.
    “I do know the difference between movies and real life,” Anne said to Neal.
    “Yeah? Well, maybe you can teach it to me sometime.”
    On the way out they passed Anne’s eleven-thirty, two nervous screenwriters clutching a couple of notebooks and a pile of dreams.
    “So what have we found out about ‘these people,’ Graham? And what people are we talking about?” Neal asked when they got back in the limo. It was as much an accusation as a question.
    “Well, we found out what accounted for Harley’s cleaning up his act.
    “What?”
    Graham told the driver to go to the corner of Hollywood and Vine.
    “What’s at Hollywood and Vine?” the driver asked sullenly.
    “What’s it to you?” answered Graham.
    Neal perused the bar, found a little bottle of Johnny Walker Red, and poured it into a glass as the limo eased out of the lot onto the street.
    “What’s going on, Graham?” he asked.
    Neal tossed back the whiskey. It was like sitting by a fire on a winter’s day. He noticed that Joe Graham was rubbing his artificial hand into the palm of his real one. It was something he did when he was nervous, when he had something on his mind that he wanted to get off. Neal finished his drink and waited.
    “So,” Graham asked, “are you on?”
    Neal didn’t want to be on. God, he didn’t want to be on. He wanted to be off in the world of old books, sitting in a quiet room taking orderly notes. But if this was just a simple custody case, they wouldn’t need him. Graham would track Harley down, call in muscle if he needed it, and take the kid home. So there was something else.
    “What aren’t you telling me, Dad?”
    Graham shook his head. “No. You first. Are you on?”
    You owe, Neal told himself. And not just money. You were a lost kid yourself once, and the only person in the world who gave a good goddamn was Joe Graham, who’s sitting here now, wearing out his one good hand.
    “Yeah, I’m on.”
    The rubbing stopped. Graham palmed one of the little whiskey bottles and opened it with his thumb and forefinger. He took a sip straight from the bottle.
    “I didn’t want to tell you too much until I saw you in action again. I had to make sure you were …”
    “‘Okay’?”
    “Three years is a long time, son.”
    “So did I pass?”
    “Yeah.”
    “So tell me the whole story.”
    “Not now.”
    “When?”
    “After church.”
    The driver looked back in the mirror and sneered. “What the hell kind of church is at Hollywood and Vine?”
    A placard board read the true CHRISTIAN IDENTITY CHURCH, REVEREND C. WESLEY CARTER, MINISTER. Its big white plastic cross loomed above a sidewalk festooned with broken wine bottles, free-floating newspaper pages, crumpled cans, and greasy sandwich wrappers. Pimps in all their sartorial splendor leaned on their Caddies and Lincoln Town Cars watching their little girls in white leather hot pants munch on doughnuts as they vamped passing cars. Pretty teenage boys dressed in tight denims and T-shirts sat on bus benches and peeked out from under their long bangs in a more subtle form of advertising, visible only to the informed.
    If you took the view that a church was supposed to be a hospital for sinners, the corner of Hollywood and Vine was a great location for a church.
    The church was immaculate, not in the immaculate conception sense, but in a utilitarian-, Protestant way. The highly varnished wood shone with righteous energy, the modest carpeting was vacuumed to within an inch of its life. Pamphlets had been laid out in precise order on a table in the foyer.
    The congregation was even cleaner. They were mostly older people, as you would expect of a Wednesday afternoon, but there was also a significant minority of younger men. They had the deeply tanned, lined features of outdoor workers. Their jeans were pressed and they wore